How to Fix Weak Retrospective Action Items
If your Scrum Team regularly cites "Better Communication", "Improve Quality", "Less Stress", "More Teamwork", etc., etc. as Retrospective Action Items, consider me completely unimpressed. I like fixing those things, but as Action Items for a Retrospective, they are milquetoast and dull. I would also guess that if those are Action Items coming...
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Can the Sprint Goal Be Altered? Yes!
The title of this post is somewhat of a contradiction, but I am OK with contradicting myself from time-to-time. On the Certified ScrumMaster's LinkedIn group there was an interesting conversation about what should a Team do when they have finished all their work before the end of the Sprint. Other...
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What We Believe About Agile
Happy New Year! We hope that 2015 started great for you. To kick off what we expect to be more frequent blogging, this post describes what we believe about Agile. I'm motivated to write this for two reasons - to explicitly state our point of view and to prepare for a Certified...
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Six Factors that Make an Organization Agile
"Are we doing Scrum right?" "Is SAFe the best Agile framework for us?" "Are we Agile [enough] yet?" Common questions from beginners and decision-makers investigating Agile software development. For me, I find it hard to give a specific answer to these questions because it depends on a number of more interesting questions...
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Check In & Check Out – Core Protocols
Ever work with a Team and the whole group wants to go in one direction, except for one person who digs in and refuses to budge? This happened to me a few weeks back while teaching a Product Owner class and I was completely stumped. I like to consider myself a...
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Fix Your Broken Daily Scrum
Why Tools Drive Daily Scrums into the Mud I have observed a disturbing pattern in many Daily Scrums driven by an intense focus away from the three questions and to various Agile tools. I see people checking out of the interaction, I don't hear all voices, I don't feel any...
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